INTO THE WOODS • Ozark Actors Theatre

Road trip!!

OAT's season closer, "Into the Woods", was inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.  In Sondheim and Lapine's 1987 Tony award winning morality tale, familiar storybook characters, along with a few new ones, venture into a dark forest for different reasons.  They may be known from children's stories, but these woods -- an allegorical rite of passage of sorts, offer up some hard lessons and somber themes for the group that leave the lot of them changed from when their journey began.

After the opening line, "Once upon a time…", our Narrator (Lanin Thomasma) introduces us to our primary players -- Cinderella (Sabra Sellers), Jack (Michael Detmer) and a Baker and his wife (Blane Pressler and Brittany Proia), whose wishes force them all "into the woods".  Cinderella wants to go to the King's Festival and Jack is ordered by his mother (Laura Light) to head to the market to sell his best friend, the family cow, Milky White (Rebecca Light).

NOISES OFF • Ozark Actors Theatre

Woo-hoo, road trip!

I'd never been to Ozark Actors Theatre, now celebrating its 25th anniversary season, and I'm glad I made the trip.  They're located in Rolla Missouri, just about an hour and a half away from St. Louis city.  The Cedar Street Playhouse, originally a church, is a nice little theatre space with about 170 seats and a great brew house restaurant a few blocks away, but I'll get to that later.

Michael Frayn's Noises Off had its origins when he realized that watching a play from backstage could be way more entertaining than watching it as an audience member.  The resulting one-act play, Exits, was later expanded into the three-act Noises Off, a play that many consider to be the cleverest farce of the twentieth century.  The title takes its name from a stage direction indicating sounds made offstage intended for the ears of the audience.  <-- I love that...